Page:Weird Tales Volume 3 Number 1 (1923-12).djvu/27

26 from the railhead, drought, horse sickness, rebellion, famine! A snap of the fingers—Ah! but the fingers were far too dry to even snap.

The man dreamed on and on, stretched out his naked feet, felt the ants bite them, looked stupidly at them and wondered nothing. And the sun came down like crackling indignation. Indignation that it couldn't kill the world. The burned-off veldt, right to the horizon, laughed its black face at being for once immune.

And the scent of burned-off grass and bush came floating over.

The man sniffed his nose, stretched legs which cracked, got up. As a man the jackals are not here to eat them. The suffering hag. Laughed! Then his face came sober.

"And you're a mother?" he said. "And I'm a father. And I can no more help you than you can help me. The store is empty. I have tinned sardines and whisky. That's all. Not even meal. I don't know even if I have the strength to cut the lid from a tin of those same fish."

"M'Lungu. M'Kewa. Chief. White man," the woman said in the trust of despair.

"Oh, don't call me names," the man came back in Kaffir in feeble joke. "Today I'm as you are. Umfazi, woman, we're looking straight at death."

The woman really smiled and showed teeth under a taut, skin-tight jaw.

"I know it, M'Lungu. I stepped over some of them as I came to you. Even the jackals are not here to eat them. The country is empty of all life, and my life is going, too."

Little Africa, this is terrible, but it's the truth. We found him afterwards and most of his message written in his useless cashbox. He'd put the story there for someone in case a human being should ever again in history care to venture up in that forbidding land.

The man staggered on his feet, felt the hot sand, laughed as he'd laughed at many a music hall show, laughed as he'd done at a good turn in Drury Lane or at a dinner in the old Savoy when his own clothes and the clothes of "Her" would have kept a family for a year. Just laughed. The Kaffir hag laughed with him, not knowing why he laughed.

"Come inside," the man said drily. "Come inside. There's sardines and whisky, and you and I and death. And how can man die happier?"

The woman faltered to her feet and threw her heavy blanket aside. Her strength was far too gone to carry it and stand the hope of food and "mouti," the medicine to clear her of the congested donkey skin. Hope was in her, the want of company in the man. Company in death—not the hunger of carnality.

The man counted out—four tins of sardines left and not an eatable or shootable thing within six hundred miles. No strength to shoot in any case. The end. The man'd die gamely.

WO tins he opened and gave to the naked woman; one he opened and ate on the blade of his knife. And he gave the woman some of the useless whisky, which meant nothing any more.

And side by side at the counter, with his arm around her, the man who had eaten at the most distinguished clubs in London ate and drank with the most distinguished thing on earth—one who faces certain death and can smile.

The man gave her more whisky, Little Africa, and gave her more and more. Her system was better than his that way and her need was more exceptional. The woman woke, the man woke. Strangely, the man who was going to die kissed the woman who was going to die—a thing he'd have loathed just one short week before and the woman didn't understand. Kaffirs don't kiss.

But he kissed her—for a woman, from Patagonia to the Volga, is a woman—and a man facing the going out would always have one last kiss from any woman, then Heaven is unnecessary. He kissed her just as they stood side by side up against the packing case counter and when she had a handful of sardines in her mouth.

The two went out under the veranda, and side by side white man and Kaffir woman sat. She knew what she was facing—he knew what he was facing. The present for perhaps another day, the uncertain future forever. Company! Against all laws of outside, civilized nature company. And she'd play straight. Just the touch of a starving arm, a starving lip, a starving soul. God! Little Africa, have you seen that?

The Kaffir woman sat, and a Kaffir only squats. She sat like a lady because her day was out forever—and some people know how small life is.

"M'Lungu," she asked. "Why did a big chief like you come into a country where all is unhappiness?"

The big chief turned a neck which creaked.

"I came to escape unhappiness."

And then the Kaffir looked at him with all the knowledge of a million centuries.

"They always let us live till last, don't they?" she said in her own language.

The man put an arm round her and drew the woman to him. To him she was suddenly sweet. They all know. We all know, don't we?

We know the things we've lost.

And in the Hell of the Awful Forced Last Day it comes back. It never leaves, Little Africa.

The man held her, and somehow it didn't seem right. Held her to him and felt the knifelike ribs at her sides, the bulge of the undigested horror of food in the stomach which a vulture would turn sickly at.

Then the man answered:

"Yes, they let us live."

The liquor in the woman had warmed and she seemed to find her brain.

"The M'Lungu came here for something he didn't want to?" she ventured inquisitively.

In death truth doesn't hurt.

"Yeabo, umfazi. Yes. I came to kill my mind. To escape the woman I loved."

The woman looked at him in a way that means the world.

"In my race there is no mutual love—at least none that we're supposed to recognize. We're bought and sold, but—"

The man hugged the Kaffir woman to him with greater strength.

But is all life." he said. "Just 'but.' And I loved her better than God loves His children, cleaner than the deer its young, stauncher than an elephant its only child. We married. We had just that one child."

The woman looked up knowingly.

"The child die, M'Lungu?"

"No. The woman died—to me."

"You sold her, M'Lungu?"

"No, she sold herself."

"And then you hated her?"

The man's eyes looked into the haze, and through the haze and into a life that might have been. Looked at the woman he'd married and the man who'd stolen her. Looked at the scorn that showed upon her face when he'd tried to get her back, looked at the great disdain when she'd hung upon a man more powerful than he, more able to make life as she thought she was entitled to have had it.

"No, I loved her," the man said quietly. "There are some loves which Hell itself can't kill."

The woman drooped forward.

"There is no single word in Matabele for what you call 'love, she said.

"No," the man answered. "Why need there be when there's this?"

Round the corner of the baking mud store came the mother of two little babies—the mother of two little pups. Two little terrier brats. The mother staggered, wabbled on her legs, whined. Turned to her babies and with dry